SEOUL - Korean tech giant Samsung has announced a new series of SSDs (Solid State Drive) that are not only smaller and cheaper, but also offer better speed and greater performance than those currently available in the market.

The new Samsung 950 PRO flagship SSD comes in the smaller M.2 form factor, which is targeted at ultrabooks and mobile devices, and offers sequential read speeds of up to 2,500 MB/s (MegaBytes per second) and write speeds of up to 1,500 MB/s.

In comparison, last year's Samsung 850 Pro SSD was able to offer read speeds of up to 520 MB/s and write speeds of 550 MB/s.

The greater speeds are possible using a new Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) specification, which replaces the traditional SATA3 interface, as that has performance limitations.

The new NVMe protocols, which boost performance yet lower power consumption, were specially designed for SSDs.

Available in October, these drives are cheaper than competitor drives.

Intel's NVMe SSD is priced at about US$400 (S$565) for the 400GB version. The 256GB version from Samsung is priced at US$199.99 and the 512GB is priced at $349.99.

The drives will come with a five-year limited warranty, and a 1TB version will be released next year.